DevTeach Part Deux

My second day at the conference has been the best so far. First off, I presented a great session on "What's New in Visual Basic 9" and it was a hit! It may have been because of the beer that was available outside ;-) but I think it was because of all of the awesome features I showed. Okay, I did draw a blank on one demo but recovered with lots of laughs after blaming it on the beer.

What was really fun was the 20 minutes of LINQ to XML I showed. People went nuts over the feature. Someone said, "So we don't need XQuery?" and I went up close to the mic and created one of my many sound effects: "cheeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr... and the crowd goes wild!" and everyone laughed and clapped. That made my day. I was rushed in the end and wasn't able to show my Northwind Virtual Earth demo but guess what?!! Jean-Rene, the organizer of DevTeach, needed to fill an extra slot this afternoon so I volunteered to do an entire session on "Conquering XML with LINQ in Visual Basic 9". I'm putting the deck together now and this will be a VERY fun session as well.... even without the beer! :-)

The other totally awesome thing was that Sara Ford came up and sat on a panel to talk about Open Source with Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin. It will air on .NET Rocks! on Dec 6th. She was accompanied by our very own VB MVP Rod Paddock, and ASP.NET MVPs Shaun Walker from DotNetNuke Corp, and Rob Chartier. It was a great discussion and Richard opened up with one of the funniest computer nerd stories I ever heard.

Enjoy! (And if you're here at the conference, come see my talk at 4:30pm!)